What are the differences and similarities between schools and philosophers?ΒΆ
Hui Xiang (hx2303)
Philosophers are acknowleged to be the most critical-minded thinkers that we know. And their think process happens through the writting as a form of intellectual exploration. Below I will explore some questions including:
- Can different schools/philosophers think the same thought ?
- Is there a large difference in sentence emotion for schools ?
- Do philosophers in the different school have similar sentimentοΌ
The dataset used for this project is a pre-processed one from the History of philosophy project (http://philosophydata.com/). It contains over 300000 sentences mentioned by philosophers from 13 schools. The dataset also includes additional information for the length of each sentence, publication date as well as the pre-processed sentences obtained from different text-cleaning methodologies.
Prior to answering above three questions, I did some data-preprocessing on the text data. Specifically, I removed some stopwords, then I lemmatized all the words in the sentences to ensure that all the transformed words are in the same format.
Q1.1: Is there any similarity among the trending philosophers ?ΒΆ
I chose the top 5 trending philosophers using the dataset by counting and sorting the sentence length written by each philopher and do a word cloud analysis to get the most frequent words used in their texts.
From the plot, we observe that Aristotle, plato, Hegel, Foucault, and Kant are most productive authors compared to others. The amount of sentence they published also denote their popularity.
From the word-cloud above, I found that Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel put more emphasis on logicial understanding, and to some extent they have a lot of similar thoughts thet can be observed from the word-cloud.
As a father of the Western logic, Aristotle puts his emphasis on reasoning and his abundant remarks about human nature as rational animals scattered through his texts and we can see the words such as "reason", animal" displayed on the wordcloud.
Kant also supports reason and logic. He belives that reason is the source of morality and the aesthetics comes from a faculty of disinterested judgement. The most frequent words used by Kant including "reason", "principle", "concept" are all reflections of his believe and thought.
Hegel mentioned that "the rational alone is real". What he meant was that all reality is capable of being expressed in rationale. Again, many of the words he used most in his sentences like "determination", "consciousness" and "universal" all demonstrate his believe.
In contrast, rather than the empirical, practical, and commonsensical thoughts of the previous three philosophers, Plato's believe and thought is more abstract and utopian. Some of his words including "soul" and "seem" show the abstract perspective of his thought. Plato is a devoted follower of Socrates and the word Socrates was mentioned frequently by Plato as shown in the word cloud.
Q1.2: Can different school share the same thoughts ?ΒΆ
Similar to word count of philosophers, we can also find resemblance and difference of schools' thoughts and believes through the word cloud.
Analytic school and Aristotle school are both supporters of logics, reasons and natural science. Many of the words used by them are more rational like "theory", "think", "reason", "fact" and "nature".
On the contrast, continental school have a totally different view than Analytic school and Aristotle school. Continental school reject the view that natural science is the only way to accurately understand the natural phenomena. They think science depends upon a "pre-theoretical substrate of experience" which is inadequate to fully understand the nature. They tend to take a strong interest in the unity of theory and practice. Therefore, we can observe that continental school like to use words including "form" and "relation" demonstrates their opinion about the unity and combination of theory and practice. The words like "nature" and "difference" shows their rejection towards the scientific understanding about nature.
Plato and German Idealism schools are both advocates of idealism. However, German Idealism acknowledge the deficiencies of empiricism, which can be observed from the words like "determination" and "consciousness" that German Idealism is less abstract and utopian compared to Plato.
By using word count exploratory data analysis, we are able to capture information which reflects the thoughts of philosophers. Some common words shared by multiple schools/authors are signs which could be the evidence of the similarity among their thoughts. The difference of words used by these schools/authors can also show the difference of their thoughts. These information helps us to answer the first scientific question: Whether there is any similarity/difference in the believe and thoughts among the trending philosopers/schools.
Q2οΌIs there a large difference in sentence emotion for schools ?ΒΆ
From the stacked bar plot above, we can see a clear pattern that rationalism, empiricism and capitalism schools have the most percentage of positive words. In contrast, Continental, feminism, nietzsche and stoicism have the most percentage of negative words. Analytics and phenomenology schools have the most percentage of neutral words.
The percentage of positive words mentioned by rationalism, empiricism and capitalism schools all excees 50%. Among almost all schools, percentage of negative is the lower compared to other 2 aspect of sentiment. Phenomenology school mentioned over 45% neutral words.
Above is the 3D clustering scatter of school using their sentiment analysis result. All 13 schools are divided into 5 groups based on their sentiment level of different emotions: The blue group (group 1) contains schools which mentions most positive words. The green group (group 3) includes schools which frequently mention negative words. The purple group (group 4) is consisted of schools that tend to mention neutral words. The red group (group 2) are all schools which have the mixed sentiment.
We can observe that even schools asserting opposing opinions could use words in similar sentiment level. For example, Plato's thought is more abstract and utopian, while Atristotle's thought is more practical. However, the words they use in their sentences are classified having the similar sentiments.
On the other hand, analytic and rationalism schools are both supporters of logics and reasons. However, the emotion level of these two schools are classified into separate groups. Analytic school like to mention a lot of negative words while rationalism school is keen on positive words.
Q3:Will philosophers in the different school have similar sentiment ?ΒΆ
As we can observe from the 3D cluster scatter plot above, a lot of philosophers are grouped together as they use similar way and emotion to express their ideas. Such similarity exists even they are in different school and have different opinions. For example, we can find that in the red group, many philosophers in german idealism school have a very similar word sentiment as some of the philosophers in empiricism and analytic school. They possess different views about the way people learn knowledge about new things. However, their style of using a mixture of positive, negative and neutral words to express their idea is similar. As a result, they fall into the same cluster.
ConclusionΒΆ
We saw that emotion might be more related to a person's own personality or a school's own style of work rather than their believes and thoughts. Even schools with imcompatible opinions could have the same emotion while schools holding agreed conceptions might have totally different sentiments when writing sentence. Although the ways and aspects philosopher think about the world are different, they might use the words that are alike to express ideas.